Monday, November 23, 2009

How to be a Tank Loved by Healers

Many of us interact with tanks on a daily basis in WoW. Either they are tanking for you in raids or heroics. They are either pugged or guildies or friends. Yet all of them need the back up of very special people in order for them to bask in the glory of being a tank - healers.

As healers, tanks can abuse us until we call it quits but if you want to be a tank loved by healers, there are some very simple guidelines to follow.

Don't be squishy - Are you at the defense cap? That's a start. Get some dodge, parry or whatever the hell mitigation stat you need so you don't blow up when you get hit. Oom healer = stressed healer = pissed off healer.

Give us some leeway - You can have all the mitigation in the world but it won't matter to us if your HP is 20k. We need some breathing room in case you take a big hit and we're not busy praying our heal lands in time before you take another big hit and hit the floor.

Do your job - You can have the best HP and mitigation but that doesn't mean anything if you can't hold threat. If healers get heal aggro doing their jobs and die, it's your fault and good luck finding healers willing to heal you. If you're not going to do your job right, then healers don't need to do their jobs for you.

Don't make us carry you - Many times, bosses have predictable abilities that do a lot of damage. If it involves causing the tank a crap ton of damage, don't just expect us to heal through it, blow some tanking CDs to help us a bit because most likely the entire party or raid will be taking damage too that we need to heal up.

Give us our due - Sure, you are a good tank but remember tanks have a symbiotic relationship with healers, so don't forget to give us a nod or some type of acknowledgment. Our job is thankless enough already.

Suck up to us - If you really want brownie points, flattery works best. Bribing too =) This way you get your own pocket healer whenever you need one. Hey, works out to the benefit of both parties, right?

Anyway, a lot of this is common knowledge but I'll be damned if I don't come across tanks (especially pugged ones) that flout these guidelines regularly.

Share some of your tanking horror or glory stories in the comments! Till next time!

8 comments:

Very true, and this holds especially true in PvP. Your arena buddies will turn against you in a hurry if they die, because as a healer you can completely prevent every death, in their eyes. You never get CC'd, spell locked, etc. And if you do then you're bad and shouldn't have.

Nevermind the fact that they zerged the enemy healer leaving 2 dps to roam free on you and forced you to leave the safety of your pillar/LoS tool in order to reach their blood-crazed asses.

Healing is very thankless, and anything that goes wrong is rarely ever someone else's fault in their eyes. It's quite annoying really.

It's actually a lot of why I gave up Holy as my main spec and went to Ret (that and the fact that I only went holy in BC because the guild needed me as a healer.)

uhm... if you see someone visit your site 135 times today from the same IP address, I'm not stalking you. My internet bugged out and brought this page up over and over and over again and I didn't know how to stop it :(

That needs to be said way more often, we healers seem to get the short end of the stick. as an example, I was healing H DTK earlier and even after warning the tank and dps not to stand in the black void zones enroute to the first boss, the party wiped twice. They blamed me, saying I wasnt healing them, this happens WAY too often. Just because we can heal, doesnt mean we're gonna go OOM because you cant be bothered to pay attention to where you're standing. Sorry for the rant but I seen this post and thought I'd say my piece. Great post!

i play a pally tank, and i have to admit, i dont always give healers the credit they deserve, although i dont usually blame them for wipes, healing is an art, and a good healer is something i dearly cherish. The only thing i cant stand is when healers in randoms, sit there and and let me die when they have 75% mana!!!!

I am a healing pally, and doing the randoms you run in to a lot of tanks, that are new or just starting out. Ran a random HOL and had a druid tank that it was plain to see that he was new at it. After two bad pulls and premature pulling of the first boss, i told him to do me a favor...breath that i could tell he was new at it and to just take it one step at a time and i had his back. He was soo worried about making sure he had aggro he was running all over the place and not really keeping aggro on anything. The run went a lot better, at the end he pst me thanks. Not like i am going to see the tank again but it was a sweet short moment.